how did this happen?

Lynne Munson at the Common Core blog:

New York City’s Board of Regents has chosen David Steiner as New York’s new education commissioner, EdWeek reported earlier this week. Steiner’s move to Albany comes after four years as dean of Hunter College’s School of Education.

Why are we happy with the regents’ pick? Because Steiner is widely known for his commitment to a rigorous, comprehensive curriculum, and he has published quite a bit on the subject.

Don’t take our word for it, though – read how Steiner describes his schoolboy days:

“I read the classics as they were then understood—Austen, Brontë, Chaucer, Conrad, Dickens (not a favorite), Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence, Milton (sampled, and put aside for years to come), Mann, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola—and many authors of the second rank. I recall Trollope, Webster, Spencer, “modern” novelists of every hue—Fitzgerald, Roth, Updike, Nicholas Monsarrat, Storm Jameson (a close family friend), John le Carré—and so many others lost to memory.”

We’ll be watching with interest.

Boy. Me, too.

Steiner was on the board of the Core Knowledge Foundation, he did the ed-school syllabus study a few years ago, and he worked with Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First to create Teacher U at Hunter College.

Steiner's appointment has happened at the precise moment I was gearing up to lobby for adoption of the Core Knowledge curriculum here in Irvington. The precise moment. Ed says we should see if he'll come to town to give a talk.

The press release describes Steiner as "a bold and provocative education reformer."

That's something you don't see every day.

David Steiner on the state tests

This past week I presented research to the Board of Regents that clearly suggests the need to adjust the "cut scores" on the state's grade 3-8 English and math exams to more accurately indicate student proficiency on those exams. The Board endorsed the rationale I presented and I will adjust those scores accordingly.

[snip]

If our tests are to be a useful tool, they have to give us meaningful information — not only about a student's current level of proficiency, but also about that student's future prospects. So we looked at linkages and connections, to better understand the signals that indicate whether a student is on track to pass Regents exams and to go on to higher education prepared to do college-level work.

The research told us many things. Most significantly, it revealed that some students who have scored "proficient" on state exams were unprepared, without remediation, to do the work required of them when they reached college. That must change.

"Proficiency" on our exams has to mean something real; no good purpose is served when we say that a child is proficient when that child simply is not.


a sequenced curriculum

But more rigorous exams are only one piece of the Regents' broader reform vision — a vision that includes a more challenging, sequenced curriculum, stronger preparation for teachers and principals, and a world-class data system.

[snip]

We are embarking on a new era of reform, and the goal is clear: to provide all students with a world-class education that prepares them for college, work, citizenship and lifelong learning.

Changes will make New York's standardized tests more meaningful
by David Steiner
July 25, 2010

David Steiner, David Steiner

here

here

and

here

Amazing.

Teacher YOU Training Institute

This is a good development:

Education Week
Published Online: February 5, 2008
Published in Print: February 6, 2008

College and Charter Groups Team Up to Train Teachers

Leaders plan to expand pilot to include educators in noncharter schools.

By Bess Keller

New York

David M. Steiner ricochets from one media device to another in a classroom here, coaxing his two dozen students through a lecture on Plato with jottings in English and ancient Greek, a map of post-Classical Athens, and a stick-figure diagram of the philosopher’s famous cave allegory.

It’s not your usual Saturday-morning fare, especially for these students, who Monday through Friday put in long hours as teachers themselves. They have come to Hunter College’s education school for the day. As the pilot group for a new program being devised by their charter school employers and Hunter, they expect to earn master’s degrees in elementary education down the road.

“Our single largest challenge is … people, the challenges around human capital,” said Norman Atkins, the chief executive officer of Uncommon Schools, one of the three charter-management organizations behind the venture.

To recruit, keep, and improve the best people, he said, the three groups needed to come up with a better way for their busy teachers to earn the provisional certification and later the master’s degree required by New York state. Leaders of Uncommon Schools, KIPP in New York City, and Achievement First are confident that such a program will have broad appeal in this city, and envision admitting some 500 students a year in 2011 to the two-year program. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has blessed the plan.

The venture, tentatively called Teacher YOU Training Institute, follows other efforts germinated outside universities to boost the power of teacher preparation. The High Tech High charter-management organization in San Diego has notably started its own teacher-licensing program and will soon grant master’s degrees, for instance.


True Collaboration

What sets the New York institute apart is the close collaboration between the entrepreneurial groups and Hunter College, the City University of New York’s premier teacher-preparation school. And, it might be said, the involvement of Mr. Steiner, the school’s dean and a scholar known for his cutting criticisms of the teacher-training status quo.

Five years ago, as an education professor at Boston University, Mr. Steiner unleashed a minor tempest with a study of the coursework required for aspiring teachers at 16 leading education schools. He concluded that it was mostly “intellectually barren,” often ideologically skewed to the left of center, and just not very useful in the classroom.

The Hunter dean now has a chance to show how it should be done. According to his collaborators, who said they approached just about every university with a teacher-preparation program in the New York metropolitan area, he singularly embraced the new approach.

“It was hard to find a partner,” David Levin, who heads the KIPP charter schools in New York City and helped found the Knowledge Is Power Program....

It’s Hunter’s gain to work with schools “that have among the best performance in the city,” offered the dean, who decided to teach the Foundations of Education course himself—his first go at it in seven years.

That course and the 10 others required by the state are being “redesigned from scratch,” say the institute’s leaders, to fit the needs of teachers in the high-expectations climate of the three charter groups, which together run more than two dozen schools serving children from low-income families in New York and other Northeastern cities.

[snip]

The teaching course included such in-the-trenches advice as how to distribute and collect papers in the least time possible (along with an analysis of the resources saved, such as 67 hours of teaching time in a year) and how to use disciplinary measures fairly and effectively.

[snip]

As the afternoon goes on, Mr. Steiner, who studied politics and philosophy at Oxford and Harvard, seems to overflow with ways long-dead Plato can speak to the teachers occasionally fidgeting in their chairs. Would the philosopher, he asks, countenance the image of teaching as pouring stuff into kids’ heads? [ed.: I would like more pouring, please] Not at all, he contends. On the other hand, Plato was certainly a “sage on the stage,” not the “guide on the side” often commended to aspiring teachers in education schools.

“Education is about the exemplar,” Mr. Steiner advises before rushing to his next point.

[snip]

Besides being tailored to hours available to the teachers, the program is almost free, thanks to an arrangement that the institute has made with AmeriCorps, the federal program for putting young people to work in community service.

[snip]

Reflecting the results-oriented, data-driven nature of the three organizations’ schools, the institute’s leaders plan to make the final condition of earning a degree proof that the teachers’ students have grown academically. [next project: getting rid of the word "grow" used in lieu of "achieve," "learn," or "progress"]

“We’re developing standards of student-learning gains,” Mr. Atkins of Uncommon Schools said. “We’re looking for meaningful data that students … are learning.”

[snip]

In addition to teachers from the three founding charter-management organizations, the students would include teachers in other New York City schools, both charter and noncharter, most of them from the New York Teaching Fellows program run by the district to bring in high-quality beginners.

“The people from our network were seeing the training needs of our teachers, but we also felt we were developing a level of expertise we wanted to share with as many teachers as possible,” said KIPP’s Mr. Levin.

Vol. 27, Issue 22, Page 10

k9sasha on holistic teaching
Teacher YOU Training Institute

Meyer, Steiner, & Bauerlein on Thursday at CUNY

Peter Meyer is moderating Steiner & Bauerlein!

The ELA Common Core Standards: The path to a better educated America?

The ELA Common Core has been called the most radical change in American public education in the last 50 years. On the eve of the introduction of these standards into thousands of classrooms , join Dr. David Steiner and Dr. Mark Bauerlein for a provocative discussion about how the ELA Common Core will transform our schools.

Thursday, February 28
Roosevelt House at CUNY
Reception: 5:30 PM
Discussion: 6:15 PM
Where: 47-49 E. 65th St., New York, NY, 10065
65th between Madison & Park

Register here

I just signed up to go.

"Are Teacher Colleges Producing Mediocre Teachers?" TIME

TIME article by Gilbert Cruz.

Are Teacher Colleges Producing Mediocre Teachers?

OK, but is there anything constructive or promising here?

The article was based on a speech by Arne Duncan on Thursday to Columbia University's Teachers College. Duncan said:

"By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,"

"By almost any standard."

{I'll ignore the 21st century remark.]

Then, Cruz quotes David Steiner, New York's education commissioner as saying:

"And if we can't identify the skills that make a difference in terms of student learning, then what we're saying is that teaching is an undefinable art, as opposed to something that can be taught."


"Until recently, Steiner served as dean of Hunter College's School of Education, where he was a vocal critic of the typical ed-school approach, in which teachers-in-training study theories and philosophies of education at the expense of practical, in-the-classroom experience."

Then Duncan is quoted as saying:

"I am urging every teacher-education program today to make better outcomes for students the overarching mission that propels all their efforts."

But what is the "standard" that should be used? It's one thing to argue mediocrity "by almost any standard", but there has to be some agreement over what that standard should be. The only standard that seems to be available is a mix of 50 state standards - all low. Some apologists of bad results complain that the bad scores on the tests mean that the tests are fundamentally flawed or that the schools didn't teach the specific material of any particular question. Apparently, these people are quite capable of arguing the "by almost any standard" position.

But the problem is not just poor implementation and a lack of focus on outcomes. It's philosophy. It's low expectations. The problem is that people disagree on standards. We can't even get started.

Actually, I'm more encouraged by Duncan's arm-twisting in states to force them to open up more charter schools. I can't imagine a top down solution to the problem of education that won't be watered down or manipulated. Either parents have to be allowed to send their kids elsewhere, or schools have to provide parents with choice. TERC or Singapore Math. I don't expect the education world will give up control easily. They will accept (low) accountability and weak standards first.

"Growing headwinds for Common Core"

I haven't been following the progress of PARCC....and I hadn't realized how central the idea of common assessments were to the Common Core undertaking, although I should have.

Looks like things aren't going well on that front:

Yesterday, PARCC released the cost of its tests—and right on cue, another state, Georgia, dropped out of the testing consortia. This is a disaster.

At this point, I won’t be surprised if we end up with 20 or more different testing systems in 2014–15. So much for commonness, so much for comparability. Rigor and alignment with tough standards are likely the next to fall.

That's how the consortia crumble
Andy Smarick / July 23, 2013

Here is Truth in American Education on Whiteboard Advisors Insider Results on Common Core.

And here is T.H.E. Journal Magazine on Remaining PARCC States Affirm Commitment, Get on Track for Field Testing By Dian Schaffhauser 07/30/13

The "Insider" brief is fun: Tracking Measures, Growing Headwinds for Common Core, and Prospects for Administration Policy Proposals May 2013.

This reminds me David Steiner's observation, which I've heard him make twice...which was that, at least in his view, the point of Common Core was to get around the fact the Constitution leaves education up to the states. That's why Common Core produced standards instead of curricula, Steiner said: the U.S. federal government cannot constitutionally impose a central curriculum on the states.

So the idea was to impose a central set of standards instead.

I guess common assessments adopted willingly by individual states were another means of circumventing that obstacle. (They would pretty much have to be if the goal is to circumvent the constitution.)

The whole undertaking now seems crazy to me.

Get around state prerogatives?

By creating a complicated and expensive common assessment states have to buy?

[pause]

Maybe this is crazy; I haven't thought it through.

If you really want common assessments - if you actually want to make common assessments happen as opposed to almost make them happen and then have states pull out of the consortium - pass a law requiring every student in the country to take one of the already-existing standardized tests when he or she leaves school.

SAT, ACT, SAT Subject Matter tests, Accuplacer....pick one, pass a law requiring 18-year olds to take it (is that constitutional? I don't know), and fund it.

Then you have a nationally standardized comparison of all students in the United States.

Andy Smarick's other post is worth reading, too: The Complicated Economics of Testing in the Era of Common Core Standards


The Role of the Federal Government in Public Education in the United States

assigned reading at schools of education

In the domain of foundations of education, the books most often required by the programs we reviewed were authored by Anita Woolfolk, Jonathan Kozol, Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, Joel Spring, Howard Gardner, and John Dewey. Woolfolk’s work is a textbook in educational psychology, and one of Joel Spring’s volumes is a textbook in educational foundations. The rest are well-known works that embrace a constructivist and/or progressive standpoint. Conspicuously absent from almost all such syllabi were works that took a very different approach to teaching, such as those by E. D. Hirsch or Diane Ravitch. (We found Hirsch on two syllabi, Ravitch on just one.) Equality of education is a central theme of these courses, as evident from the included authors. Nonetheless, not one of the foundations courses, in the 15 schools of education for which we had complete data sets for that domain, asked students to read The Black-White Test Score Gap, at the time of our review arguably the leading collection of scholarly writings on that subject. We also noted that eight of the programs of teacher certification we reviewed did not cover either the philosophy or the history of education among the courses required for certification.

source:
Skewed Perspective
David Steiner
Education Next

I'm feeling ornery today.

Then again, I always feel ornery.

engageny is a full curriculum, I think

I noticed in the Comments thread for Allison's post people talking about whether engageny is or is not a full curriculum.

I think it's intended to be a complete curriculum (but I could be wrong).

Last fall my district replaced Math Trailblazers with engageny and nothing else. The curriculum director told us that they'd saved roughly $100k by going with the NY state curriculum (which had not been written when they adopted it).

I mentioned in the comments thread that, a few years back, I went to a talk by David Steiner, who said that the state was going to write a complete math curriculum states would be free to use or not. He didn't say anything about writing a supplementary curriculum. The plan was to write a complete curriculum districts could use instead of a curriculum they'd purchased from a textbook company.

I think what they've posted is the result.

Here's the wording from the website:

In order to assist schools and districts with the implementation of the Common Core, NYSED has provided curricular modules and units in P-12 ELA and math that can be adopted or adapted for local purposes. Full years of curricular materials are currently available on EngageNY, for grades Kindergarten through 9th grade in Mathematics and Kindergarten through 8th grade in English Language Arts (ELA). NYSED is working with our partners to deliver high quality curricular materials for all remaining grades in both Mathematics and ELA. In Mathematics, full years of instruction will be available for all remaining grades this summer. In ELA, full years of instruction will be available in 9th and 10th grade this summer and 11th and 12th grade this fall.

Common Core Curriculum

They've posted 105 lessons for Algebra 1.

I counted.

David Steiner resigns

Terrible news.

advice for curriculum committees everywhere

We've got so much going on here in town (posts t/k) that I'm only dimly aware of what is or is not happening at state & federal levels .... so I was surprised to discover this Daily News editorial yesterday while paging through looking at whatever it was I was looking at post-tennis lesson, no less.

I assume this is what they're referring to.

The Regents are authorizing the development of a performance-based approach to teacher certification and inviting – on a trial basis – new entities to prepare teachers for certification. As part of this new approach, the Regents will support the development of new performance-based assessments for teacher certification (including the eventual use of value-added assessment as a component of professional certification), will develop new methods to recruit and retain teachers for high needs schools in subject shortage areas and will allow additional content knowledge demonstrations for prospective teachers to bring new talent into the teaching field.

I'm interested to hear from teachers on this.

I would dearly love to see different teacher training programs (I'm guessing most teachers would dearly love to see different teacher training programs), and I think David Steiner is the person to do that.

But why does Kendall Hunt get off scot-free?

Or Heinemann?

Shouldn't these folks have to show a value-added value or two?

I guess this is a policy question, really. Targeting teacher-ed programs seems like a good idea to me. At least, it's a reasonably novel idea -- and I think that, historically speaking, a reform effort directed at medical schools may have had an enormous effect (yes?)

Data is good; value-added is good. In my view.

But targeting teacher ed programs and pushing through value-added measurements without reference to New York state's vendor-driven curricula is a different matter.

Have I ever mentioned my rule of thumb for school districts buying curricula?

Buy whatever homeschoolers are buying.

NY state technology standards

I've just heard from a parent here....

My district is considering cutting French, Latin, and Greek --- and adding a technology teacher to K-5 in order to meet NY state's "technology standards."

I had no idea we had "technology standards," but come to find out, we do.

I do remember, back when David Steiner had first been appointed Commissioner of Education, attending a lecture at which he told us that the Board of Regents considered 'technology' very important. I think he may have said that he'd had some debate on the subject with one particular member of the Board, but I'd have to check my notes to make sure. Since checking my notes would entail finding my notes, that may not be happening. (Was I still using my AlphaSmart then?)

Does Common Core have "technology" standards?

New York State Technology Standards

Elementary and Intermediate Grade Levels

Standard 1 – Analysis, Inquiry, and Design
Students will use mathematical analysis, scientific inquiry, and engineering
design, as appropriate, to pose questions, seek answers, and develop solutions.

Standard 2 – Information Systems
Students will access, generate, process, and transfer information using
appropriate technologies.

Standard 5 – Technology
Students will apply technological knowledge and skills to design, construct, use,
and evaluate products and systems to satisfy human and environmental needs.

Standard 6 – Interconnectedness – Common Themes
Students will understand the relationships and common themes that connect
mathematics, science, and technology and apply the themes to these and other
areas of learning.

Standard 7 – Interdisciplinary Problem Solving
Students will apply the knowledge and thinking skills of mathematics, science,
and technology to address real-life problems and make informed decisions.

The whole megillah

"awful to be 18 and not have choices"

I was already a devoted fan of David Steiner before he was appointed New York state's Commissioner of Education. I'm rapidly becoming a devoted fan of Meryl Tisch, too.

In today's Wall Street Journal:

Acknowledging that a New York state high-school diploma doesn't mean a student is necessarily ready for college, the chancellor of the Board of Regents said she envisions the state providing two types of diplomas in the near future: one that is marked "college-ready," and one that is not.

There is no formal proposal yet to do so, but Merryl Tisch, the chancellor, said the move would be a natural extension of a broad effort by the Regents to toughen up academic standards. Those efforts are fueled by increasing evidence that even while New York students have been showing marked progress on state tests, their performance on national tests has stagnated.

"It's awful to be 18 and not have choices," Ms. Tisch said.

Nearly a quarter of students in all New York state two- and four-year colleges need to take remedial course work, according to John King, the state education department's deputy commissioner. Students taking remedial courses in their first year of college are less likely to graduate, he said.

According to research by the Department of Education, students who scored below an 80 on their math Regents exam have a much higher likelihood of being placed in remedial college courses. Students only need a 65 to pass the math Regents test in New York.

Regent Eyes New Diploma
By BARBARA MARTINEZ
JULY 17, 2010

death by data

A teacher in my town posted a link to this story:

The Lab School (Lab School at US News) has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.

“Definitely one of a kind,” said Isabelle St. Clair, now a sophomore at Bard, another selective high school. “I’ve had lots of good teachers, but she stood out — I learned so much from her.”

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

This may seem disconnected from reality, but it has real ramifications. Because of her 7th percentile, Ms. Isaacson was told in February that it was virtually certain that she would not be getting tenure this year. “My principal said that given the opportunity, she would advocate for me,” Ms. Isaacson said. “But she said don’t get your hopes up, with a 7th percentile, there wasn’t much she could do.”

That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.

She may leave anyway. She is 33 and had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking the teaching job, at half the pay.

“I love teaching,” she said. “I love my principal, I feel so lucky to work for her. But the people at the Department of Education — you feel demoralized.”

How could this happen to Ms. Isaacson? It took a lot of hard work by the accountability experts.

Everyone who teaches math or English has received a teacher data report. On the surface the report seems straightforward. Ms. Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. Her students were predicted to get a 3.69 — based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s value added is 3.63-3.69.

[snip]

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

[snip]

In plain English, Ms. Isaacson’s best guess about what the department is trying to tell her is: Even though 65 of her 66 students scored proficient on the state test, more of her 3s should have been 4s.
But that is only a guess.

Moreover, as the city indicates on the data reports, there is a large margin of error. So Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile could actually be as low as zero or as high as the 52nd percentile — a score that could have earned her tenure.

Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: March 6, 2011

I have four reactions.

1.
A 32-variable teacher evaluation scheme does not sit right with me if only because it lacks transparency. This teacher has no idea why her score falls in the bottom 7% of all teachers in NYC, and neither does anyone else including her principal and students.

2.
Is this teacher running afoul of a ceiling effect? Her students were already scoring well above average coming into her class -- isn't it harder to bring above-average students further up than it is to bring below-average students to average? Working on SAT math with C., I'm convinced that the jump from 550 to 600 is a shorter leap than the one from 600 to 650. Whether or not that's true for the SAT specifically, I'm pretty sure people have shown it to be true with other tests.

[pause]

Yes. It's a well-known effect. ^*

3.
I flatly reject the assumption that New York state tests are capable of distinguishing between a group of students earning 3.57 on average and a group of students earning 3.69 on average. A few years back, when C., who is a fantastically good reader,^** scored a 3 on reading, I got in touch with our then-curriculum director, who told me that NY state tests in some grades have essentially no range of scores in the 4 category at all. That is, if you score a 37 or 38 out of 38 correct, say, you earn a 4; score a 36 and you're a 3. I checked the test and sure enough. She was right. There was no range at all for the 4. I don't know whether David Steiner has changed the tests in the year he's been in office, but even if he has, I reject the idea that the tests are now valid and can accurately assess what the gap between a 3.57 and a 3.69 means (if anything) and whether it is equivalent to the gap between a 3.01 and a 3.13.^***

4.
On the other hand, suppose the 7% ranking is right. What might account for that?

One possibility: the Lab School is a constructivist enterprise (here's the Math Department), and this teacher was trained at Columbia Teachers College. She is teaching English and social studies to 7th graders. New York state requires that teachers have a Bachelor's degree in their field of specialty beginning in 7th grade, which means that most 7th grade teachers are teaching English or social studies, not both. One of her students says, "I really liked how she’d incorporate what we were doing in history with what we did in English,” Marya said. “It was much easier to learn.”

Interdisciplinary teaching at the middle school level tends to be shallow because students aren't expert in any of the fields being blurred together (and teachers are expert in just one field), and the only commonalities you can find between disciplines tend to be obvious and current eventsy. e.g.: back when one of our middle school principals explained to us that henceforth character education would be 'embedded' in all subject matter, the best example he could come up with was that the father in The Miracle Worker is an angry patriarchal male who is abusive towards his handicapped child. That "interdisciplinary" reading of The Miracle Worker is anachronistic, simplistic, and wrong.

It's impossible to say whether these scores mean anything.

But if they do, they suggest to me that a 7th grade teacher needs to focus all of her efforts on English or on history, not on both.

English literature and history are very different disciplines.

I wonder how other teachers in the school fared - and, if they did better, how true they were to the middle school model?

^* The article doesn't tell us whether the city's statisticians correct for ceiling effects and regression to the mean.

^**C. typically missed just 1 or 2 items on SAT reading & writing tests.

^*** Of course, given the very wide range for 3s, perhaps a .12 difference is significant. It's impossible to know -- and that's the problem.

score inflation in NY

Over the last few years, student performance has soared on math and English tests across New York State, with the most dramatic improvements evident in urban districts such as Buffalo, leading many to celebrate the progress.

But now, state education officials say the progress may not have been quite what it seemed.

Weaknesses in the state’s testing and scoring systems over the last several years created what Education Commissioner David M. Steiner equates to systemic “grade inflation.”

• Students who score at the “proficient” level in middle school math, for instance, stand only a 1-in-3 chance of doing well enough in high school to succeed in college math, he said.
• Students begin getting “inflated” test scores before they hit high school, state officials said. A student who scores a 3 on a state math test — which is considered “proficient” on the scale of 1 to 4 — stands only a 30 percent chance of getting an 80 on the high school Regents math exam, they said.
• ...a student who scored at the proficient level on a state test in 2006 was in the 45th percentile on the national test, meaning that 55 percent of students in the country scored better. In 2009, the same score on the state test would land a student in the 20th percentile on the national test, meaning that 80 percent of students nationwide scored better.

The state Education Department recently asked a group of experts, led by Harvard University’s Daniel M. Koretz, to determine how closely eighth-grade scores correlate to high school Regents exam scores — and how well those Regents exam scores correlate to success in college.

Flawed tests distort sharp rise in scores by students
By Mary B. Pasciak
Updated: July 06, 2010, 11:42 pm / 19 comments
Published: July 07, 2010, 6:35 am